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On-board wifi will be the end of airline in-flight entertainment

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While internet speeds on most flights have traditionally been frustratingly slow, with dozens of people fighting for the same limited bandwidth, that’s beginning to change.

Retrofitting planes with wifi has become dramatically less expensive, while airplane manufacturers like Airbus and Boeing can now deliver new planes pre-configured with wifi at a very low incremental cost.

Meanwhile, speeds on satellite wifi connectivity has continued to improve. As a result the number of flights offering wifi service that is actually pretty good has risen.

Markets that have been the slowest to deploy service are also getting on board, including in Australia and New Zealand, where Qantas, Virgin Australia and Air New Zealand have all signed wifi connectivity deals recently.

Smaller airlines are also deploying like never before: While passengers have come to expect wifi on large global airlines, many smaller airlines have wifi now; Routehappy identifies Air Astana (Kazakhstan), Air Côte d’Ivoire and Air Mauritius from Mauritius as a few of the new wifi entrants in 2017.

European airlines will soon have access to even faster speeds thanks to the new European Aviation Network (EAN).

3 Things That Will Change the World Today

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The EAN is a consortium that combines satellite connectivity from Inmarsat with a network of 300 ground-based LTE base stations built by network operator Deutsche Telekom to provide over 75 Mbits per second to aircraft.

Other companies tied to the EAN include satellite operator Inmarsat, Nokia and Intel.

The completion of the network follows Inmarsat’s successful launch of its EAN satellite last summer, which has since been extensively tested in orbit and has been fully operational since September 2017.

The combination of satellite with ground-based connectivity based on LTE technology means that the new network will be able to continue to improve as LTE technology continues to improve.

The move to faster wifi will likely accelerate the current trend of airlines removing in-flight screens from many planes. With most users now carrying video screens with them in the form of smartphones and tablets, airlines like United and American Airlines have begun to remove screens from some planes.

This avoids the cost of the expensive video systems and reduces airplane weight.

As airline wifi is increasingly able to support streaming video, other airlines are likely to reduce entertainment in order to reduce costs, in favour of enabling customers to access streaming services.

That means a lot of simultaneous streams of Stranger Things could be coming to an airplane near you soon.

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